Will Google perceive these as paid links? Thoughts?

[CliXelerate]

Here's the challenge. I am doing some SEO triage work for a site which offers a legitimate business for sale listing service, which has a number of  FOLLOWED link placements on news / newspaper sites - like this:  http://www.spencercountyjournal.com/business-for-sale.

(The "Business Broker" links & business search box are theirs.)

The site has already been penalized heavily by Google, and just got pushed down again on May 8th, significantly (from what we see so far).

Here's the question - is this the type of link that Google would perceive of as paid / passing page rank since it's followed vs. nofollowed? What would you advise if it were your site / client?

From everything I've read, these backlinks, although perfectly legit, would likely be classified as paid / passing pagerank. But please tell me if I'm missing something.  My advice has been to request that these links be nofollowed, but I am getting pretty strong resistance / lack of belief that these links in their current state (followed) could be harming them in any way.

Would appreciate the input of the Moz community - if they won't believe me, and the majority here agrees about nofollowing, maybe they'll believe you.

Thanks!

BMT

[Carson-Ward]

Google doesn't always send out messages for penalties. They're getting better, but they still have a ways to go.

If the site is experience large drops in traffic (vs. slow declines) it's almost definitely a penalty of some sort. Steep declines are unlikely to be caused by navigation and architecture unless pages are completely unreachable or something large is altered. If there are large drops, try to line those up with the algorithm change history.

[CliXelerate]

Thank you, Marie - that's been my thinking as well, from every angle that I look at it.  And while there's been no "official" notice from Google, this site has lost >50% of its Google / organic traffic year over year, and it looks like (too early to say for sure) it just suffered another ~20-40% drop around May 8th.

Just trying to get some support for one small piece of extensive triage efforts we're embarking on for these guys - they haven't done anything malicious, but they do have some significant site quality and architectural / duplicate issues to tackle. Right now they're a long way away from being close to ready to request a reconsideration, and I think once we get the bulk of their issues addressed & repaired, they may not need to request one. Plus they were never entirely de-indexed, just hammered very badly and "de-impressioned."

Thanks for taking the time to post your view - I appreciate your input!

[MarieHaynes]

I'm going to disagree with a few of the responses here and say that these links are definitely against the Google quality guidelines.  The first line in the section on "link schemes" of the quality guidelines says that a link scheme could be any link that is bought or sold that passes PageRank.  If this is a followed link it passes PageRank.  It certainly looks like an ad to me and as such, in order to meet the guidelines it needs to be nofollowed.

One or two of these links are not going to get a site penalized, but a lot of them could.

Now, do you actually have a penalty in WMT?  If a site already has a penalty and is trying to file for reconsideration, one of the things that Google wants to see is that they are committed to following the quality guidelines from this point on.  If the webspam team sees that the site is actively building new links like this then this is not going to help your case.

But, on the other hand, if there is no manual penalty at play here then I would guess that this type of link is unlikely to hurt the site algorithmically.  I'd still nofollow them though because they could be harmful should the site ever go under manual review.

Earlier this year Google devalued the PageRank on many news sites (most of them European though, I believe) because they were selling links.  It's possible that the drop in ranking for your site is related to this and not a direct penalty on your site.

[CliXelerate]

Michael - agree absolutely - it's certainly not THE reason - there are multiple (multiple) reasons why this site is currently not performing / well & has been penalized in the past.  I'm just trying to eliminate / get consensus on whether one small (but known) reason may be a risk, so that we can apply best practices to address it.

Curious - why do you feel that Google would specifically not possibly categorize exact same backlinks, not using nofollow, placed in an advertising section of a newspaper / news site, as violating Google's quality guidelines?  If you can point me to a specific article / Matt Cutts post, etc., I would be grateful for the info. So far in my searching, I haven't been able to find anything which advises not simply employing nofollow on this type of link placement.

And (see above replies - also) no warning in WMT, but what appears to be a clear drop in Google organic traffic for this and a sister site, commencing May 8, with a number of references to "More Focus on Paid Link Schemes" (this synopsis from a recent Matt Cutts video:  http://returnonnow.com/2013/05/2013-google-penalty-plans-matt-cutts-video/ )

So, my recommendation to the customer is to simply have these nofollowed, based on the potential risk, to eliminate any additional penalty. But the customer is hesitant to believe that Google would possibly perceive these as falling into the "paid link / passing page rank" category. So it's not even concurrence on whether the site was penalized specifically for this, this time around, but whether these could be perceived as paid / page rank passing - in which case it seems the best practice would be to nofollow them. So that's the question I'm looking for input on - not why (overall) the site has been, and continues to be penalized.  All the potential issues at the moment are too many to list here.

Thanks for your input!

[CliXelerate]

Thanks for your post, Karl - very good point on the branded note. The brand in this case = the business type = a top key phrase. I completely agree, there's definite risk there if little to no variance is applied (which, in this case, there is not much). As for the overall backlink profile, using OSE and much more in depth tools - it's actually not bad, nor were they penalized for their overall backlink neighborhood.

Just to clarify - there are multiple reasons for this site being penalized in the past, which we'll be addressing as we have time / resources.  It seems like it's been hit hardest by the low quality site updates, vs being penalized for bad neighborhood association. I'm just going through a process of elimination in targeting what we can / should fix that we have control over. And this fairly large set of links - all followed vs. nofollowed - stand out to me as being potentially perceived by Google as being paid / passing pagerank since nofollow has not been applied.

So what I'm looking for are thoughts on whether in this specific context (same backlinks / format, no links deper than homepage, followed vs nofollowed, placed in "paid" sections (classifieds, etc.) of news sites - might be perceived as paid per Google's quality guidelines / algo's.  If so, I am of the strong opinion that they should be nofollowed - just to eliminate even the potential for penalty, as well as adhere to best practices.

Hope that clarifies a bit, and thanks again for your insight!

[CliXelerate]

Thanks for the reply, Workzentre - however - I'm not sure you're fully interpreting how follow / nofollow can work in regard to passing pagerank.  This article calls out the issue with paid links / pagerank / using nofollow pretty clearly, I think:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html  And, as has been seen quite recently, either the publisher OR the advertiser can be penalized for not employing nofollow on this type of link.

Even if custom tagging were used, the question I'm trying to get answered is, based on their own recent algo update statement and the quality guidelines posted by Google, would these links, placed in a paid / classifieds section of a news site, and NOT set off by nofollow - be potentially perceived as paid?

This is just one small part of cleaning up a massive amount of issues for a site which has been pretty heavily penalized for low quality already. But since it also just took another hit, I'm trying to eliminate what I can as being a potential risk / cause.

Hope that makes sense, and thanks for your post!

[CliXelerate]

Thanks, Adam, for the reply.  I read that as Google might send out a notice, however, vs. receiving a notice of paid links is absolute. According to Matt Cutts (this link:  http://searchengineland.com/google-sends-hundreds-of-thousands-of-webmaster-notifications-each-month-90-are-black-hat-related-148524 ) the link buying / selling notices are less than 3% combined out of all the WMT notices sent.

If you read the WMT policy, it seems to clearly state that this type of link - when NOT specifically nofollowed - violates Google's quality guidelines:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html

Also, if you read Rand's SEOMoz thread which you linked to, the overall consensus, even back then, along with Rand's adjusted guidance, is that there is significant risk involved with placing paid links at all.

What I'm looking for here is consensus on whether links with this specific placement (in a "paid advertiser" section of a news / classifieds site, which are NOT using nofollow, would likely be perceived by Google as potentially paid. IMO, they could easily be perceived as such, given the context.

It sounds like you think differently, which I completely respect, but it would be great to see any recent authoritative articles / resources which give more info on why these would not be interpreted as paid / passing pagerank.

Thanks!

[CliXelerate]

Thanks, Carson for posting.  And no, no WMT "bad link" smackdown notice (nor is their % of toxic / suspicous links alarming).  As for a paid link warning, does Google even send those?  Either way, negative on that count, too.  There are numerous other issues with the site in question, including some hesitant architectural decisions which have resulted in a large amount of duplicate content / multiple paths to destination URLs, so the site's very likely been hammered for that as well.  Plus incredibly tortuous nav, an insane amount of links on the homepage, previously no robots.txt, no sitemap (coming soon) and at one point up to 3.4 million pages indexed (for a 30K page site).  Also two parallel coding platforms, DotNet + ihtml.

I've got a complete audit already, and we've stuffed cotton in the wounds hemorraghing the worst, while we start to tackle fixing the architecture & duplicate nav / content / non-customized URLs piece, etc.  Also addressing a number of server errors.

Aong with that, we're also working to address other potential issues, and these particular links, since they're already on paid / advertising (classifieds, etc.) pages - stand out to me as links which seem to fall under the "paid placement which can pass page rank" category, which is clearly stated to be targeted in algo updates, as well as the Google Webmaster Policy. However, the customer in this case is confident that these links are not hurting them - so it's a bit of a challenge pursuing the path of "fix what we have control over" and employ best practices.  They also rolled these backlinks out in two large batches last summer (way before I was on board), rather than spreading them out a bit, and there is little variance in the anchor text (brand name / business name).

Almost everything I've read indicates these should be nofollow, but the customer would like to read what the SEOMoz community has to say also. So here we are.

Thanks again, for your input!

[Carson-Ward]

It's possible that these links have something to do with it.  At least I think it's premature for us to be ruling it out. Has there been a warning about unnatural links or paid links in Google Webmaster Tools?

The "businesses for sale" links are fairly widespread and styled in a way that could be considered hidden. Exact-match anchors styled to look like text are never a good combo.

I don't know whether the links are the source of the problem. It could be manual, it could be a search quality update like Panda. Without more info and a full audit, it's hard to tell. The letter of the law is pretty clear that one should nofollow links if money is changing hands for the link. Personally, if I was constantly getting slapped by Google, I would follow the letter of the law.

[KarlBantleman]

I'd agree with the people here that it is unlikely these kind of links are the reason for the penalty. If you haven't already, do a backlink analysis on Open Site Explorer and look for any links that look like spam such as article directories, low quality directories etc. Also, have a look at the percentage of branded links vs anchor text links because it may be this that resulted in the penalty.

[workzentre]

Having such links does not seem to be the penalty cause, follows vs. nofollows are for your own care and to decide who would you help in reference. Anyway to prevent google treating these links as "paid PR", if this is some kind of white label widget, make sure that every website that uses this widget uses unique links, so with a quick mod to the system add an extra parameter to the links depending of the customer using the widget.  I don't know If I catched the point.

Regards.

[MichaelYork]

I highly doubt that is the reason the site was penalised.

Did you receive a warning in Webmaster Tools?

[NaescentAdam]

I've always thought it was ok as they are advertisements but to be honest I dont know the answer.

These might help.. In the first article Cutts is quoted as saying you would get an unnatural links warning in webmaster tools.

But I thought these two might help you:

1.http://searchengineland.com/after-penalizing-interflora-uk-newspapers-google-warns-against-advertorials-149371

(An old one)

2. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stance-on-paid-links-link-ads